With continuous rise of data amount and storage requirements, new hard drives generally need to be added into an access storage system from time to time. However, while the hard drives in the access storage system increase, the amount of electricity consumed by them goes up continuously, and energy consumption keeps rising. Reducing storage system energy consumption (that is, computer energy consumption) is a current focus in the industry.
Currently, an advanced power management technology is used to reduce energy consumption of a storage system. The advanced power management technology is a host power management scheme based on a basic input/output system (BIOS, Basic input/output System). In this scheme, energy consumption of a device that accesses a host can be reduced, that is, a device is switched to a low-energy-consumption state in view of the working state of the device that accesses the host. However, in the existing advanced power management technologies, different devices that access the host receive a uniform power saving management manner passively, for example, the devices are suspended uniformly (that is, the display screen is powered off automatically), or the devices are suspended to a memory uniformly (that is, the system stores the current information into the memory), or the devices are suspended to a hard drive uniformly (that is, the computer is shut down automatically, before which the current data is stored onto the hard drive), and so on.
In the process of researching and practicing the prior art, the inventor of the present invention finds that in the existing implementation manners, a BIOS uniformly instructs different hard drives that access a host to enter an energy-saving state. Consequently, energy consumption of each hard drive that accesses the host does not perfectly match the traffic generated in accessing an actual service, and the overall energy-saving efficiency is undesirable.